


Outside of Closed Curtains

by Synthetic_Miracle



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AU, Based On A Writing Prompt, Faeries - Freeform, Found Friends, Gen, Kidnapping, Near Death Experiences, kinda horror, slight broganes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 13:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16138346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synthetic_Miracle/pseuds/Synthetic_Miracle
Summary: Keith and his roommate Shiro live normal lives. Like everyone else, they make sure to avoid looking outside from 3:00  to 6:00 AM in order to escape the wrath of an unknown evil that roams around during that time.  The same mysterious monster that had taken so many innocent people over the years, including Keith's father. So, they kept the blinds drawn tight and never even went near them. That is, until one morning, a knocking starts coming from outside Keith's window.





	Outside of Closed Curtains

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning, this story has not been beta read, I've just gone through and edited. 
> 
> The prompt is, "People must not look outside from 3:00 am to 6:00 am. Children are often kept in windowless rooms and adults often wear blindfolds during sleep to avoid incident."

Keith knew not to look outside. He knew it, knew it as a fact of life. The sky was blue, gravity pulls things down to earth, and you don’t look outside between 3:00 and 6:00 AM. It was knowledge that had been pounded into his brain as life or death by his dad since he was a toddler. Everyone was aware, if you look outside during that part of the morning, you’ll never be seen again. Children often speculated about why that might be, but even world governments had stopped trying to figure out what exactly was out there, wandering amidst the early morning mists. What happened if you broke the rules, nobody was sure; just that sometimes entire households would go to sleep, and by 7:00 AM, someone would be gone, the only sign of what happened a cracked open window or slightly askew curtains. It had happened to Keith’s dad, leaving him an orphan. That was long in the past though; Keith was nineteen now,  living with his roommate and best friend, Shiro, but he always made sure to keep the curtains tightly shut. That is, until one day he heard something knocking on the glass. 

 

It was 3:58 AM when Keith was startled awake by a loud, steady knocking coming from his window. He looked around his dim room to the drawn blinds, which were still fully covering his window. The knocking was definitely coming from the outside, but Keith looked at the clock and knew that no one could possibly be out there. Thinking that he might be going crazy, Keith cautiously got out of bed and padded over to Shiro’s room, grabbing his sheathed dagger on the way. He softly opened the door and went over to the rumpled figure on the bed. Shiro woke up immediately once Keith tapped him, going from bleary to alert immediately when he noticed Keith’s anxiety. 

 

“What happened?” Shiro asked worriedly. 

 

“There’s a- a knocking? Yeah, a knocking, coming from outside my window, I think. Shiro, can you please come hear it for yourself? Am I going crazy?” Keith responded, panicked at the thought of the thing outside his window, perhaps the same thing that had taken his dad when he was young. Shiro just nodded in response, quickly growing concerned. 

 

The pair walked quietly back to Keith’s room, and sure enough, as soon as they neared it both could hear the knocking bouncing through the silent hall. Shiro decided to take the lead, entering Keith’s room and walking up to the window. 

 

“Shiro, what are you doing?” 

 

The fearful question broke the eerie reverie that had settled over the apartment. 

 

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to open it. You’re definitely not hallucinating though, I have no clue what the quiznak is happening,” Shiro said. Keith approached his friend, and they stood together in the dark room, watching the window in trepidation as the knocking continued without once faltering. The two continued standing there, waiting and watching and listening, never once taking their gazes from the window. 

 

Suddenly, the knocking stopped. After a moment of fearful silence, the window started creaking, slowly being opened from the outside. The curtains stayed in place, hiding whatever lurked outside from view.  Keith tightened his grip on his dagger and Shiro tensed up.  Both felt paralyzed, they wanted to turn away, to flee their impending doom, but were kept still by morbid curiosity, or perhaps something… else. Then, a corpse gray finger,  topped by a razor sharp claw, peeked through the curtains, slowly moving them to the side. 

 

The boys stood still, kept in place by some dark force rather than survival instinct, as before them was a terrifying creature. Its skin was dead and gray, the eyes creepily human looking. Framing the creature’s face were horns, with imps hanging off of them, chattering creepily as the monster smiled at the humans mischievously. With a snap of the unholy beast’s clawed hand, Keith and Shiro were transported outside. Around them, creatures of varying appearances roamed. None of them looked very similar, each taking a distinct and ghastly form. A few of them appeared dangerously beautiful, but still had mischief, evil, and something scarily inhuman carved into their features.

Neither man knew what exactly the monsters were, nor could they do anything but watch as their captor kept them paralyzed and hovering behind. Keith and Shiro observed the creatures as they partied around the town, which was devoid of any other humans. Everyone else still had their curtains firmly closed, all blissfully unaware of what was occurring outside. Time passed weirdly for Keith as him and Shiro were dragged around behind the monster, but eventually the tip of the sun started peaking up and the creatures started vanishing. When their captor decided to call it a night, it vanished in a puff of smoke, taking its prizes with it. 

 

The realm in which Keith found Shiro and himself was strange; it was terrifying yet gorgeous, carrying an innate horror within. As the friends were carried deeper into the foreign realm, Keith noticed their surrounds kept warping and changing. One minute they would be in a field of tree-sized glowing mushrooms, the next the landscape would change to a forest of dead and twisted trees, then a desert with obsidian sand, and so on. After what felt like an eternity, Keith and Shiro were dropped into a cage made of giant thorns. Once inside, they could move and speak again. 

 

“What do you think this all is?” Shiro whispered. 

 

Keith just shook his head,responding with a dejected, “I don’t know. The only bright side is that they haven’t taken my dagger.”

 

“Hopefully it will actually have an effect on this stuff. It looks like a lot of magic,” Shiro said. 

 

The two stayed silent as they looked around their relatively spacious cage and ever-changing surroundings, trying to find a way they could escape. After a while, an increment of time that was impossible to tell in the strange dimension, more of the monsters appeared, with more humans in tow. One creature was carrying a short teenage girl in green pajamas. She had long brown hair thrown into a ponytail and eyes filled with a glare that screamed determination. Another was carrying two teenage boys, one was gangly with bright blue eyes and tan skin, taken in a rumpled blue t-shirt and sweats, a face mask still on. The other was more heavy set, stuck in yellow pajamas and a sweatband, his soft brown eyes on the brink of tearing up. 

 

Once the other captive humans were dumped unceremoniously into the cage, the confused chatter began, voices overlapping. 

 

“The Unseelie fey, of course! They shouldn’t have been able to get in to my house but they did, they did!”

 

“Are we ever going to go home? We’re going to die here aren’t we?!”

 

“We’re going to be okay, it will all work out fine, it will all be fine.”

 

Keith decided to chime in, worried that their keepers would overhear them, “Guys, be quiet, we have to get out of here, but we can’t do that if they separate us.”

 

“Shh, everybody, we’ll all be okay. We’ll get home, we just need to figure this all out,” Shiro said, taking charge and comforting the other captives. Shiro and Keith’s combined efforts got the bunch to quiet down. 

 

“Call me Pidge,” whispered the girl quickly. “Don’t say your real names if you haven’t already, I think we’ve been taken by faeries, and they can do a lot with a name. A nickname or alias will work. Do any of you happen to have any iron? ”

 

“Wait, wait, wait, fairies? Those beasts do not look anything like Tinkerbell!” the blue-eyed boy said indignantly. His exclamation lightened the mood, which the others were grateful for, if slightly annoyed at. Pidge rolled her eyes and decided to explain.

 

“Faeries, the non-Disney version, are mischievous to an extreme, if  this is the Unseelie court, like I think it is, than they may be very sadistic. I doubt we’ll survive more than a few months here if it’s anything like the stories. However, if they know your real name, you’ll be way worse off,” Pidge responded. The boys stared at her blankly for a moment before speaking up. 

 

“Can the nickname be based off of our name?” Shiro asked.

 

“Sure, though it’s best to be nowhere close to your full name,” Pidge answered. 

 

“Okay, I’ll start then. I’m Shiro.”

 

“Red,”said Keith.

 

“Shoulda gone with Mullet,” the boy in the face mask muttered. Then, with a challenging look towards Keith, he said, “I’ll go with Blue.”

 

“Uh, I can’t- I can’t think of one, sorry guys,” stuttered the guy in yellow.

 

“How about Sunshine,” suggested Blue. The boy in yellow smiled thankfully at him, and nodded. 

 

Shiro smiled at the teenagers before looking to Pidge for more information. 

 

Pidge decided to repeat herself and ask, “Does anyone have any iron? According to legend, it burns faeries, they can’t stand it.” 

 

The group started emptying their pockets. Sunshine came up with a screw that looked like iron, then shrugged. Nobody knew why he had a screw in the pockets of his pajamas, including Sunshine himself. The others came up empty, though Keith mentioned that he thought there might be iron in his knife, but he didn’t know for sure. Pidge nodded at that, muttering to herself that, “At least this is all better than nothing. It’s better than nothing.”

 

Everyone sat thinking to themselves for a minute, so Keith decided to try his dagger on the thorn bar closest to him. To his surprise, the knife bit into it easily. “I guess there probably is some iron in there, then,” he thought to himself. “Quiznaking weird magic thorns.”

 

“Alright team,” Shiro said, trying to reconvene. When everybody was paying attention again, he gestured for Pidge to take it away.

 

“Okay, okay,” she started, “we’re trapped in the Unseelie court, which is filled with powerful, magical fey,  with a single iron screw and maybe a dagger to get us out. We can’t fight our way to freedom, and they will turn any poorly made bargains against us. Does anybody else have any ideas?”

 

“My knife works on the magic thorn things, so I guess we probably do have the dagger,” Keith said. Pidge looked relieved that at least they had more than the one screw. 

 

The prisoners kept on brainstorming, trying to keep their minds off the horror around them. The twisting landscape did nothing to ease their minds, the change unsettling and confusing. It worried Keith that he didn’t know exactly how to leave, but he had kept track of the direction they came from, which brought  him some sparse comfort. What creeped Keith out the most was that his dad had likely died somewhere here, in this creepy world so far from the relative safety of home. And he might be joining his father soon, unless the ragtag group of young adults managed to defy fate and escape from the middle of the Unseelie court. 

 

The team had created  a small semblance of a plan, one that was incomplete and likely to fall apart due to their lack of knowledge, but a plan nonetheless, by the time that a faerie came to get them. 

 

“Stand,” demanded the faerie in an odd, guttural voice that seemed to reverberate through the cage. The humans did as they were told,  Keith with his knife hidden against his forearm, the sheath tip subtly poking out of Shiro’s pocket to hopefully throw them off. Pidge, Blue, and Sunshine did their best to look weak and intimidated, with Pidge and Blue going so far as to start crying. Sunshine took it to another level and puked, keeling over and looking very pathetic. The faerie looked disgusted at them, and told Sunshine to just follow them as it froze everyone else. 

 

The faerie took a long, convoluted path to their destination. Sunshine made sure to keep puking every now and then, to continue looking nonthreatening and weak. Keith did his best to keep track of the way, but it was futile with the land changing constantly, plus he couldn’t move his head or eyes. The sensation of hard metal pressed up against his arm kept him grounded through the journey.  Eventually, the posse reached a large, foreboding clearing. 

 

The area here didn’t seem to be changing, it remained a large clearing in a misty forest surrounded by dark, gnarled trees. In the center of the clearing sat a faerie, one that was obviously very important. The faerie had a set of antler-like horns, between which a captivating blue light floated. Around it hovered what appeared to be strange knives. Its face might have been a mask, for it was made of smooth bone with two gaping black holes for eyes. Keith felt the twin voids were watching him, peering deep into his soul. On the outskirts of the clearing congregated an array of other Unseelie fey, all watching the approaching humans with malicious glee.

“We have all gathered today for the annual blood rite. Five young humans shall be sacrificed, their spilt blood will insure my reign and that of the Unseelie Court for another seven years! May the iron within them weaken only those who stand against me, your King, and allow us to maintain our bond to the human realm,” announced the faerie in the center, his voice soft and smooth, resonating loudly in the humans’ minds rather than in the clearing. 

 

The group each internally began to panic. Sunshine puked, out of genuine terror this time. They’d had the bare-bones of a plan, but now they were thrown for a loop. A sacrifice? That was messed up, and it caught them completely off guard. The Faerie King was definitely looking at Keith now, which should have terrified him. For some strange reason, Keith felt no fear, just grief. His father apparently hadn’t looked outside that night. Keith knew, as he looked into those empty holes that absolutely radiated death; his father had died right here in this clearing, for that stupid King. Perhaps Keith’s blood sang to the King, perhaps it was familiar to him because of his father. Whatever the reason, the Unseelie King had singled Keith out. The King pointed to Keith and said in his strange, powerful voice, “Him first. The rite must start strong.”

 

Keith was unfrozen and lead to the king. His head was positioned in the faerie’s lap, as the rest of his body was faced towards his friends. Although most of them couldn’t move, he could see the panic and concern in their eyes. Sunshine looked ready to run over there to help, but was kept in place by the array of watchful faeries. 

 

With his head placed on the lap of the King of the Fey, throat bared and ready to be slit, Keith felt determination start coursing through his veins. This was not how he was going to go, not if he had a say. He would never let this faerie kill anyone innocent again. With lightning reflexes, Keith slipped out the knife and put it up to the neck of the King, who hissed as the iron burned into his skin. He then moved out of the vulnerable position, never faltering as he kept the blade flush against the fey’s throat. 

 

Sunshine, noticing the opportunity, took the screw and swiftly pressed it to the skin of the faerie holding his friends captive. The fey immediately let out a screech at the burning from the iron, and not used to feeling such pain, released its prisoners. Blue then kicked out the faerie’s legs as Sunshine continued burning it with the screw, bringing the creature down. The pair stood by, making sure that their previous captor wouldn’t be able to interfere.  Pidge and Shiro walked over to Keith as the faerie audience watched, afraid to attack, lest their king be killed. Shiro stood guard over Keith, shielding him and the dagger from the other faeries, as Pidge approached the King. 

 

“You have no choice but to bargain with us, King of the Unseelie,” said Pidge. 

 

“If you do not cooperate, Red here will happily end your life,” added Shiro, who looked ready to protect Keith from any and all further danger.

 

Pidge started laying out their terms, “If you want us to let you live, you must free all of the humans you have taken, including us. 

 

You are not to go back on the bargain, none of your people can get revenge on any of the people you had stolen, or come after us at any point in time. There will be no tricks or loopholes exploited by you or those you command. You will take all humans in your custody back to their home in the human realm, alive, and never come after them. You and your people will never again perform the blood rite, or come to Earth unless summoned. You will encourage all those who come after you to do the same. Do we have a deal?”

 

The King desperately croaked out a reply, dizzy from the burning at his throat, “We have a deal.”

 

Keith was shocked that the King had agreed, especially since he didn’t even try to change the bold terms. The iron must have really hurt him, though you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at his empty face. In a sudden flash of smoke, Keith, Shiro, and the others had appeared in a deserted town square back on Earth.

 

“I said our homes, not the middle of town during the dead of night!” complained Pidge. 

 

Keith was just relieved to be out of the faerie realm, and hoped that they wouldn’t try to go back on their deal. Besides, the cool night air and soft street lights helped to soothe the adrenaline-fueled tension still racing through the him, so it wasn’t all bad. 

 

Over the time they were prisoners, the group of strangers had bonded. They had all saved each other’s lives, in some way or another. So, they exchanged real names and phone numbers, then parted ways, off at last to their respective houses and families. The experience would probably haunt them all for a long time, but for now Keith was just happy to be alive and free. Keith and Shiro walked back to their apartment in companionable silence. The friends spent the journey enjoying that the unease and horror which had plagued them the entire time they were in the Unseelie court had vanished, to be replaced with the familiarity of home.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to try my hand at writing a VLD fic, and this was the result. Hopefully it's okay, I know the dialogue is a bit iffy, it's definitely not my strong suit. 
> 
> I used the Unseelie fey as the monsters because I think they’re very interesting and creepy, plus I could make them fit into the prompt. The two main descriptions of Unseelie faeries I based off of images I found on google. The Unseelie/Seelie fey are mainly from Scottish folklore. The Unseelie court is comprised of the more malicious and evil faeries, whereas the Seelie court is made up of the more benevolent ones, though they still can wreak havoc if crossed. 
> 
>    
> Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the story!


End file.
